"Esther M. Friesner - Hallowmass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

The bishop called for peace, but all he got was silence. His robes, stiff with
their fine embroidery of gold and silver and pearl, cut a furrow through the mob
like a plough's wooden tooth tearing up the soil. He stood over Master Giles and
said, "God's mercy is great, His judgments beyond question. For your son's life,
we have purchased sight of a miracle."

"Sight...." The word rang hollow in Master Giles's throat and the laughter that
followed left many men thinking of the echoing grave.

The bishop was not one to be belittled by his servant's inattention. He meant to
do a great thing here, before his new cathedral, so that ever afterward his
action might be linked to the miracle and his name remembered. "Life is God's to
give," he said with proper solemnity. "We cannot restore what He, in His wisdom,
has chosen to take. Yet this much I can do. You shall cut me a new statue to
stand in the twelfth niche and it shall be the image of your son." He beamed
down on the desolation of Master Giles's heart as if further tears from the
stonecutter would an act of basest ingratitude.

Ingrate that he was, Master Giles wept on.

The bishop's smile shriveled. "What ails you, man? What more would you have of
us? I tell you, life lies beyond my power to restore! The woman who has done
this shall be punished, be assured of it. We will hold her imprisoned until your
son's image has been raised to its proper place, then carry out her sentence on
these very stones, so that her death may be under his eyes!"

The ruler of the Fey, once more astride the saddle, moved his steed a few steps
nearer to my lord bishop's bejeweled person. The churchman's blazing splendor
dwindled to an ailing firefly's light beside the elf's cool beauty. "I too would
make a remembrance of this day," he said.

The elven lord spoke words like the sounding of glass chimes and a cold, silvery
mist fell over the square.

Master Giles gave a small, sharp cry and rose to his feet, his arms empty. The
mist drew in, gathering itself over Benedict's dead body like a winding sheet of
frost-struck churchyard moss, molding itself to breathless flesh until all the
child's seeming was gray and cold.

And then the mist was gone, and Master Giles knelt again beside his lost love's
child to touch his fingers to a smile now forever set. "Stone," he breathed. "He
is stone."

He only half-heard the Faerie spell that next touched the image. The stone
figure of the blind boy rose upon the hands of a thousand airy servants to
settle itself at last into the embrace of the vacant niche below the great rose
window. So lovingly did they bear the boy's frozen shape that they barely
stirred the shining rubble that remained from that other, shattered statue. In
truth, only a single fragment of stone fell when they set Benedict in his final